


Kids in America

by Tlon



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Amputation, Angst, Gang Rape, Kaz suffering, M/M, Torture, Whump, actually i don't know about the canon, i don't know about anything, i think reasonably canon-compliant although god seriously who even knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-23
Packaged: 2018-08-15 10:48:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8053429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: In all the years Snake's been asleep, Kaz thinks he's discovered exactly how bad things can get. He's not even close.





	1. Chapter 1

The point man calls them skulls, skulls in the mist. Kaz doesn't know what he means, because the radio cuts off and the mist is all Kaz can see, thick choking fog that's settling into his lungs like chemical sand. Until something heavy and wet hits the ground beside him, and he reaches for it and feels cloth and raw meat – it takes him a moment to understand what he's touching and recoil.

“Stay together!” he yells at the rest of his men. “Don't let them pick you off!”

It's a futile instruction. Every time he gives an order there are fewer voices on the other end, until he can't hear or see anyone at all. He grips his rifle until his fingers burn and edges forward, not sure where he's trying to go. The border? Higher ground, where the air has cleared? Or just away from the carnage he's imagining around him?

Something flickers and gleams in the corner of his eye – blue light from the eyepieces of a gas mask. He whips around to face it and stumbles over another soft, heavy object, trying not to guess who it might have been. “Who's there?” he asks, keeping his voice as steady as he can manage. There's no answer but another flicker, on the other side of him this time. As if whatever's out there is toying with him. The only way he'll survive is by getting away from these... things... to familiar territory, somewhere that will give him the upper hand. He lowers his weapon and breaks into a run, watching for motion.

The mist is still. But it hides the body that trips him, sending him crashing to the ground before he can put his hands out to protect himself. He feels the crack of a rock against his skull, and then nothing.

*

Kaz wakes to light burning through his eyelids. His head is throbbing, but when he reaches to touch it, his arms only tug against the stiff loops of rope behind his back. He's propped into a chair, and someone's taken his shoes, leaving his feet to scrape the hot cement floor.

Air currents shift around him, and he hears heavy footsteps, even breathing. Slowly, he opens his eyes.

 _It's not them_ , he thinks with relief. But the feeling fades quickly. His sunglasses are gone, and he's staring up at a man in the familiar striped shirt of the Russian military, arms bare and muscled. The man's gaze drifts over his body in a way that makes Kaz tense, coming to rest on his face.

“American,” he grunts.

Kaz waits. He's not a soldier, has no name, rank, and serial number to give them. That's the whole point of his work.

“American,” the man repeats. “CIA.” He enunciates each letter slowly and looks Kaz straight in the eyes. “Information.”

They don't know who he is, then. But they think they know where he's from, and that's almost worse. He stays silent, and the man grins.

Pain rips through his cheekbone, compounding the blow he took in his fall – if he wasn't concussed already, he will be soon. He worries momentarily about the state of his glasses, until he remembers that they're probably back in the desert with the remains of his team.

The man follows with a strike to his chest, his stomach, doubling him over. He stops just long enough for Kaz to catch his breath, then grabs his hair and pulls his head back, leaning close. “Information,” he says. “Your mission.”

Kaz wonders if this is really the best English speaker they've got, or if the man understands more than his halting, staccato diction lets on. Maybe he's just supposed to get prisoners talking, Kaz thinks as another fist slams into him, and there's someone else on the other side of a recorder or wire that he can't see. It doesn't matter – he'll give them nothing, except the occasional groan when the man hits a rib or snaps his head back with a punch. His vision starts to dim, and the man's questions fade out, until a bucket of water brings him to his senses and they start again.

He doesn't know how long it's been when the man hits him one last time, almost contemptuously, and kicks the chair over, sending Kaz to the floor. “Tomorrow,” he spits, before he turns out the light and leaves.

For a few minutes Kaz does nothing but mentally catalog his injuries. His brain still feels muddled, and the skin under his shirt is probably on its way to deep purple with bruises. One eye feels tight and puffy when he blinks. It's all superficial, but who knows how long that will hold, once the man goes back and reports that the beating didn't get him talking.

The skulls must have handed him over, Kaz thinks; they can't have done it too long after they captured him, if his injury is still so fresh. Which means that wherever he is, they probably haven't taken him too far. If he can get out, he can pick his way back to the RV, or at least somewhere he can find a radio and call for help. Tonight might be his last chance, before they move him again or hurt him too badly.

The rope around his wrists is starting to cut off his circulation, but he can feel his hands enough to twist them around, feeling for the knot. It's just within his reach, thank god, and too thick for his captors to pull tight. He fits the tip of a finger into one of the gaps and begins worrying it. It gives millimeter by millimeter, even as it rubs his skin raw, until finally the whole thing slips and he works free with a silent sigh of relief. Wincing, he climbs to his feet and takes stock of his surroundings. It's just a stone shed, and while the door is locked, it's not hard to quietly snap one of the window catches and climb out.

Keeping clear of the floodlights, Kaz slips around the edge of the outpost, getting his bearings. The dark will cover him, but stealth has never been his strength. That was always Snake's suit. Maybe he wouldn't even be here if Snake were still around, and his men would still be alive... but that's a dangerous path. Snake is comatose – may as well be dead – and he's not the one who has to make it out of here.

On the far side of a dune, Kaz hears the fall of boots. The sand slips under his feet, and he puts a hand out for balance, hoping no one has heard him. The guard stops. He can't understand the question that's shouted into the night, but its meaning is clear enough: _who's there?_ When a flashlight shines over the dune, he scrambles back toward the cliffs, hoping to hide. It's too late. There are more of them than he thought, and soon he has nowhere to go but up sheer rock. It salves his pride that he takes at least one man down before they drag him back.

They strip his shirt and pants and throw him in front of his interrogator, back in the cell. Kaz can't see the look on his face, just his black boots, half-tied and smelling of recently applied oil. He gives an order, and someone slams a foot into Kaz's back, forcing him flat against the ground. The man is walking around him now, picking something up just outside his field of vision. Slowly, as if he sees Kaz watching him, he swings it into view: a hatchet. “No more running,” he says slowly. Kaz doesn't understand what this means until it's too late.

Steel bites the meat of his calf like a guillotine. One moment he feels the cement against his left ankle and the rocks that have embedded themselves in the sole of his foot, and the next there's nothing, only an all-consuming agony that freezes him in place during the second strike, the third. He wouldn't look back even if he could, but he feels the warm pool of blood gathering around his knee and hears a soldier kick something away from his body. Nausea overcomes him, bile coating his tongue as he tries to keep breathing through his panic. This can't be happening, he thinks. He'll wake up and be back at Mother Base, or in a mujahideen camp. He'd even take waking up tied to a chair again, as long as it's with all his limbs intact...

He cries out through gritted teeth when one of them turns him over roughly and begins to wrap a tourniquet around his leg, and cruel instinct makes him raise his head and open his eyes, looking at where his foot used to be. He falls back, hyperventilating, and for a moment he can feel it again, his missing limb, aching.

By the time they've finished binding it, Kaz is too far gone to realize.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh god i'm a monster. in my defense this is technically a kinkmeme fill, several months late.

It's light when he wakes, and every muscle hurts. It takes heroic effort to simply move, and for a minute he's too preoccupied with his other pains to remember the night before. Until he tries to lever himself up and wonders why he can only brace one foot against the ground, and then it all hits him and he only curls onto his side, where he can avoid seeing anything but the wall. He doesn't know how he slept now, because his leg feels like it's on fire. He keeps his eyes fixed on one of the room's weathered bricks, trying to forget what's on the other side.

The door slams open. Kaz looks up and squints at the man who took his leg, now holding a syringe. “Morphine,” he says simply, and Kaz nods slightly, trying to disguise how much he wants it, how much agony he's in. The man squats in front of him, puts a thumb on the plunger, and shakes his head. “Mission,” he tells him. “Tell me name.”

Kaz's heart sinks. Even if he had something to tell them, opioids are a poisoned boon – they're a dangerous dependence that his interrogators can foster, another form of leverage. “No,” he says, with difficulty. 

The man smiles, stands, and kicks him in the stomach. “Dress,” he says. “We go.”

Kaz finds his clothes discarded in a corner and puts them on with difficulty, wincing when the fabric hits his leg. He finishes just as the door opens again, and before he can see who's on the other side, they pull a bag over his head, cuff his hands, and drag him outside.

They throw him in what feels like the back of a truck, running what sounds like a chain through his cuffs and hooking it around something metal and hollow. Without his jacket, the sun burns his arms as it beats down on him, heating the black fabric of the hood. Every bump in the road nauseates him, and he's grateful that he has nothing in his stomach, even if his throat is burning for water. He has no idea which direction they've gone, and all he can hear is the growl of the engine and the rattle of rocks on metal. They must think he can tell them something useful if they're going to the trouble of moving him, he thinks, and wonders what the skulls told them when they handed him over. Whatever they were after, it wasn't him. It wasn't his men, and it wasn't any information they could have tried to wring out of him – they'd left that to the Soviets. If they're coming for someone else next – for Snake, what's left of him – all he has is the hope that Ocelot has heard what little he could get over the radio before his capture.

He loses track of time. At some point he convinces himself that he has accepted the pain of his leg, and it has no power over him. At another he imagines throwing himself over the side of the truck, strangling himself with his chains, before it can get worse. He might have imagined heroics once – the Sonny Chiba fistfight, the great escape. But his wide-eyed dreams of glory died nine years ago, and now he can't even stand, let alone fight.

The truck grinds to a halt, and he stays quiet, hoping to make out anything that will help him place their new location. Someone lifts him out of the truck roughly and drops him to the ground, and he tries to shake the dust that's gathered under his hood during the trip, and avoid thinking about what's going to happen now.

He can't avoid it for long. He's dragged across the gravel of a road and into what might as well be the cell he was in last night, for all he can see of it. Then they yank the hood off, and he sees it's a barracks, with a row of hard, narrow bunks and lockers taped with pinup girls. As he gasps in air, he notices how many men are around him, and the way they're looking at him, with a combination of contempt and hunger. He begins to struggle even before they force him onto a bed, hands tugging his clothes off until all he has is the bandage around his leg.

Kaz kicks out with his remaining foot, running it into soft flesh and getting a grunt of pain in return. He rolls to the floor and scrambles back, even as he realizes that he has nowhere to go. They laugh and wait until he begins to fumble at the window latch behind him, then knock him down and return the blow he landed, over and over, battering him into semi-consciousness. He is aware of being pushed back onto the mattress and cuffed to the bedframe, but unable to stop it, or to stop the man who pins him down and fucks him roughly while the rest of them make noises of admiration. Heroics, Kaz thinks bitterly – heroics and honor, that's what he thought he would find as a soldier. Not a decade of desperate scrapping in the dust of proxy battlefields, hoping that someday he might rebuild what XOF took from him. Not being broken piece by piece in some backwater Soviet outpost.

The rest of them take him, casually, over what feels like hours. This is nothing to them, just entertainment, something to do between drills and watches. Just a chance to feel skin beneath their thick hands and sink their teeth into someone they don't have to court or pay, or to humiliate an enemy who is bound underneath them, concrete in a way that missile strikes and sniper shots never are. Between assaults, he sees the glow of cigarette ends as dusk falls, hears the tinny synth of a cassette single that someone has put on outside the window. _Kind hearts don't make a new story, kind hearts don't grab any glory,_ the singer belts over the beat, voice clear and young. _We're the kids in America._ He closes his eyes before the tears can come.

When they're finished they take him to an empty room in the back of the compound and hose away the dirt and blood of the last day, as he swallows as much of the water as he can catch. They chain his wrist to a pipe on the wall and leave him until morning.

His interrogator made the trip with him, he realizes the next day. The man looks at his crumpled body and puts a hand around his throat, forcing his head against hard stone. “Ready to talk?” he asks. Kaz spits. The first blow comes down.

It isn't that he can't feel the impact. But it barely registers as anything beyond his default condition, as badly as he's already been beaten. He weathers a few more minutes of kicks and punches before the man seems to notice and snorts, leaving the room without a word. Kaz waits, knowing that this can't be the end. He's right, but he's almost relieved when what the man comes back with is cloth and water – this is at least torture with some dignity, an ordeal he could brag of surviving. He tries to hang onto the thought a few minutes later, while his body is not incorrectly convinced that it is drowning, and the man is barking half-intelligible questions peppered with the brash codenames of CIA operations.

Eventually he chokes one too many times and the interrogator lets him sit up, spitting the last of the dirty water from his lungs. Kaz shakes his head: _Nothing. You get nothing._

The man grabs Kaz's hair and pulls out a pistol, resting it lightly against his lips. His demand is clear, and Kaz opens his mouth enough to let the barrel slide in, cold metal hitting his hard palate. He suppresses a gag as the man shoves it deeper, closing his eyes and trying to bear the taste of oil and fear. None of it matters, he tells himself. He can take it. He can take it when the man opens his pants and replaces the gun with his cock, and Kaz chides himself for thinking he would be let off so easily. This is no different from the water, he tries to convince himself. It's just another way for them to hurt him, nothing more. The man tightens his grip in his hair and slams his head against the wall when he comes.

The interrogation is over after that, but the door still swings open periodically, marking the arrival of others who want a turn. Kaz tries to bite one of them. The man drives his pistol butt into the side of his head and yanks the bag over it, hissing a curse Kaz doesn't understand. He pushes Kaz to the floor, and Kaz is thankful that the fabric stifles the cries of pain he can no longer stop. When the man is gone he pulls the hood off and cries, tears stinging the torn skin around his eye. He manages to pull himself together by the time his next visitor arrives.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything gets worse! But then better.

Kaz doesn't know how long he stays like this, in cycles of torture for information and torture for pleasure – or are they the same thing, to his captors? He is too exhausted to even dream about escape. Sometimes he dreams of rescue, and reminds himself that the only person who could pull it off is in even worse shape than he is. Sometimes he just dreams of food, a wish that's as remote as all the others. They've given him nothing since he was taken, and dizziness threatens to overcome him every time he tries to move.

The door opens, and he doesn't bother to look up, until he hears the screech of metal against cement. The interrogator is dragging a table into the center of the room, and a chair with it, lifting Kaz onto it. He hasn't bothered with anything like this before, and the change makes Kaz uneasy. The feeling intensifies when one of his wrists is cuffed to the chair behind him, and the other onto the table, pulling him awkwardly across it. The interrogator unrolls something – a plastic apron, and a leather bag. Kaz begins to panic.

The man seems to catch it, but says nothing. He only slides the apron on and reaches into the bag, pulling out a pair of heavy shears. He sits at the other side of the table and takes Kaz's hand, spreading his fingers.

“No,” Kaz whispers involuntarily. He tries to pull his hand away, but he's too tired, and the man deftly fits the shears around his little finger. “Please, no.”

The man leans close. “Mission.”

“No, I--”

The crunch of bone rings in his ears. He looks helplessly down at the table, barely able to keep breathing through the agony of separation. Both his and the interrogator's hands are covered in blood, his blood, flowing from the space where his finger ought to be.

“I'm not CIA,” he gasps. “God please, I'm not with them, I'm not government --”

His next finger goes quickly, and for a minute everything grays out. “No, no, it's true, I'm not, I'm...” he stops short. What would he be able to tell the Soviets, that they would believe? Only the truth, and the truth is worth more than his hand, even his life. The Diamond Dogs are all he will have left to the world, and to Snake. He would rather be outlived by them than give them up like this, shaking and bleeding in the dry heat of a crumbling stone cell. He closes his eyes and waits for the next cut.

He tries not to hear the man's questions, because it will save him from being tempted to answer, when another finger falls to the table. Tears are welling in his eyes, and he doesn't bother trying to stop them, only wills himself to stay silent.

The man mutters and drops his hand – “think it over,” Kaz catches before he's left alone. He can't move to stop the bleeding, only look at his mutilated hand in horror, imagining how far this is going to go, what they're going to do to him. If he could somehow stop this now he could at least salvage the use of his hand, but he's not foolish enough to hope for that.

“Ready to talk?” the man asks him, when he comes back. Kaz shakes his head as defiantly as he can manage, nearly passing out in the process. The man sighs and shakes his head, gripping the shears.

Kaz feels the man take his forefinger, his thumb. His hand is just useless meat now, glazed in blood. He's useless.

The man asks more questions, gets no answers. He lays the shears on the table and reaches into the bag again, and even through his dizziness Kaz recognizes a bonesaw. His pride at withstanding pain evaporates when the man puts it to his wrist, and Kaz begs him to stop. He does not expect mercy.

It isn't quick, like the axe. He feels every tooth of it in his flesh and screams, clenching his good hand until his nails score its palm. The man punctuates each drag with a pause, long enough for the pain to hit him fully. His pleading must be incoherent now – it makes no sense even to him, but it's all that's stopping him from cracking and giving up the answers they want.

Outside, someone has put the tape on again, its pulsing beat at odds with the saw's arrhythmic motion: _You know life is cruel, life is never kind._

His hand bends at a sickening angle and he looks away again, gagging.

_La, la la la la la_

The man stretches rubber tubing just below his shoulder, and the blood slows. The saw's teeth lift and come down just below his elbow. He sobs.

_La la la la la_

He's seen worse on the battlefield, Kaz tells himself. He's been prepared to do worse to himself. But at least it would be quick, and he wouldn't have to see himself in pieces.

_We're the kids_

There's a moment of blankness and a blow to the face, forcing him back into consciousness. The saw moves upward. Kaz can't tell if the song is still actually playing, or if his mind has just latched onto anything that will take him out of this, like a skipping record. It has to have been hours since it started. Days. A lifetime.

_We're the kids in America_

The heat from his interrogator's breath is gone. His shoulder feels strangely light. He tries not to think about what that means.

“Nothing,” the man spits in disgust. “Nothing.”

Kaz passes out.

*

He's been clothed and hooded when he wakes, and they've chained his left wrist to the pipe again. He tries to pull the bag off with his right. But nothing happens – it isn't restrained, it just isn't responding, as if... as if it weren't there. It all comes back, and he lets himself cry silently, blunt ache spreading through limbs he no longer has. 

He still hears men outside the room, but no one touches him. At first it's a relief, but as his limbs cramp and his thirst begins to build, he waits in vain for anyone to just let his arm down for a few minutes, give him water, even if they drown him with it. It takes too long for him to admit what he knows has happened: they are finished with him. They've come away from his last interrogation empty-handed, and there's nothing else he's good for – maybe he's been too gruesomely vivisected even to fuck. This is how it's going to end.

The thought bothers him less than it should. It isn't the death he expected, but it's one he can make his peace with, as long as he can imagine that his sacrifice mattered. That Mother Base is still there with Ocelot – that bastard, Kaz thinks almost fondly – to take care of it, and that Snake is still... Kaz can't say he's at peace with leaving him like that, but there's nothing he could ever have done about it. Maybe things could have turned out differently, in another life. Not this one.

He hears footsteps, and he swears that someone says his name. Hallucinations, he thinks, as his mind finally begins to lose touch with his body. The bag is pulled off his head, and he looks up, blinded by the sudden light. “No more use for me, huh?” he mutters.

Hands grab his face – one rough and gloved, the other smooth metal. “Kaz, it's me.” The voice... it's not real, it can't be. “I'm here to get you out.”

“Snake?” he asks, in spite of himself.

“They do something to your eyes?”

Kaz shakes his head. God, it sounds just like him, and when he squints, the face he sees is the one he remembers, with some scars and a decade of added age. “No, it's... it's just bright is all.” His own voice sounds loud in his ears after so many days of holding his tongue.

Snake reaches up and the cuff on his hand comes loose. For the first time, Kaz lets himself think this might actually be happening. He raises his head, and Snake slides his glasses on for him gently. Kaz lifts his good hand and touches their frames, looking up at the man that he's done all of this for, thinking that he'd never know it. But he's here, like none of those hellish years have passed at all. Kaz wants to smile, but his face won't follow, and his quip comes out with honest, raw exhaustion:

“What took you so long?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everybody who's read and commented. I haven't done anything self-contained like this for way too long. Back to the post-Collapse AI interrogation melodrama now I guess.


End file.
